Archive for category API Apps

Ever since I’ve been old enough to leave the house on my own, my mom has always followed “goodbye” with “call me when you get there!” It never mattered if I was going down the street or 500 miles away, it was always the same.

Since joining foursquare, I’ve longed for a way for my mom to be on the service so she’d know I was safe just by watching my checkins. With her eight-year-old phone and complete inability to understand even the whole “texty” thing, it’s clear that’s not going to happen.

Now it doesn’t have to, thanks to a brilliant new foursquare API app called HashtagMom. When you add “#mom” to a check-in, it automatically gives her a call, lets her know you’re safe and reads her whatever shout you added to the check-in.

She even has the option to leave a message for you that will be delivered to your email.

If your mom is a little more tech-savvy and understands “texty,” you can opt to have HashtagMom simply send her a text instead of calling.

This is a wonderful idea because it addresses every mother’s greatest fear in a way that’s convenient and easy for us to integrate into something we’re doing anyway. Now I just need a HashtagWife service that sends my wife a text that says “I’m at the grocery store, do we need anything?”

What do you think of HashtagMom? Would you use it or would it just annoy your mom that you didn’t take the time to call yourself?

We’ve seen a number of services that send you some bit of useful information when you check in on foursquare. This content is valuable because it’s incredibly relevant, based on the place you’re currently visiting. What if you could extend that to get something relevant and useful when you add a venue to your to-do list?

ReserveMyCity has come up with a perfect way to “re-program the to-do button” to make it do just that. When you add a restaurant to your to-do list, ReserveMyCity sends you a link to make a reservation there.

It’s a simple concept, but it’s a first to take action after you’ve added something to your to-do list instead of checking in. It helps to close the loop between “I want to do this” and “I’m going to do this.”

I’ve long thought it was a no-brainer that foursquare would eventually add reservation links directly to venue pages, but it turns out that’s not likely since the most popular reservation provider doesn’t have an API. The best they can offer is a huge Excel file of their 20,000+ restaurants. ReserveMyCity has done the hard work of matching those restaurants to actual foursquare venues. It’s a manual process that simply doesn’t fit well with foursquare’s API-centric approach to, well, everything.

ReserveMyCity is trying to build a critical mass of users with which to launch the service. Once 500 users sign up (by connecting their foursquare accounts) they’ll switch the service on for everyone. The five users who refer the most signups will each get a $25 American Express Gift Card, so it pays to get your friends to register.

What do you think of the concept? What other functions would you like to see when you add a place to your to-do list?

NOTE: This post has been heavily edited to remove all references to the reservations provider that ReserveMyCity is linking to. I will never understand lawyers and it’s clear they will never understand the internet.

No matter what privacy measures foursquare has in place, there are some people who will never be comfortable constantly feeding their location into foursquare’s massive database. But thanks to that massive location database, there’s no better app for tracking the places you’ve been.

That’s why former Flickr developer Aaron Straup Cope has created Privatesquare at the Near Future Laboratory. It’s a self-hosted system that pulls from foursquare’s location database, but lets you check-in without sharing your whereabouts with foursquare. Since it’s on your own server, the data is all stored privately, but you can choose to share certain check-ins with foursquare (and then on to Twitter or Facebook).

“I don’t tell foursquare about a lot of stuff simply because I’m not comfortable putting that data in to their sandbox,” says Cope in a blog post. “So as much as anything privatesquare is about making a place to file those things away safely for future consideration. A kind of personal zone of safekeeping.”

Privatesquare also introduces a few unique tags to go with each check-in. “I am here” and “I was there” are the most similar to foursquare’s current check-in model, while “I want to go there” is similar to foursquare’s to-do list. The “Again,” “Again Again,” “Again Maybe” and “Again Never” offer a way to track how you felt about a place instead of simply saying you were there. Eventually you could create a list of the places you’ve tagged “Again Again,” for example, and send it to a friend as recommendations for a trip.

If you want to try Privatesquare yourself, you’ll need to install it on your own server. Everything is available on Github. The installation instructions call for a certain level of geekery, but don’t appear too difficult if you’re used to working with databases and OAuth. There’s currently no way to view or export your history without digging directly into the database.

Privatesquare could be a nice option for folks who aren’t comfortable sharing with foursquare. For me, the privacy options are just fine, but can understand why there are some who would prefer to keep everything to themselves.

If you happen to give Privatesquare a try, let us know what you think in the comments.

Foursquare is a great mobile platform, but I really spend most of my day at my desk. Unless I visit the foursquare website, I hardly notice when my friends check in because my phone — with its handy push notifications — is tucked away in my pocket.

A new Chrome extension, appropriately named “Foursquare Notifications” brings those check-in notifications directly to your desktop. It pops up a notification in the corner of your screen any time a friend checks in on foursquare, showing where they checked in and any photos they posted along with it. A link takes you directly to the check-in if you’d like to add a comment.

Foursquare Notifications also supports foursquare’s notification tray, so if someone adds you as a friend, comments on your check-in or one of the other notifications, you’ll be alerted.

Options let you limit the notifications just to nearby friends (although this doesn’t seem to work at the moment) and adjust the interval at which it looks for new check-ins. You can set it to play a sound each time it finds a check-in, as well.

If you feel the need to constantly know where your friends are checking in — even when you’re at your desk — this is the extension for you. Install it and give it a try. Let us know what you think in the comments.

Sometimes it’s good to break out of your routine and try something new. GetLostBot, one of the winning hacks at Honda and Rewired State’s “Power of Minds” hack day, can help by challenging you to visit a new place.

You connect GetLostBot to your foursquare account and when it detects you’ve checked in at a place you’ve already been, it suggests a similar new place nearby. It doesn’t tell you where it’s sending you; it’s up to you to figure that out from the Google Maps walking directions it provides (via either email or Twitter).

“It purposefully tries to push you out of your comfort zone and challenges you to go somewhere you have never been,” says creator Ben Kirman.

“This approach is inspired by a talk from Ethan Zuckerman, where he complains that social media tries too hard to surround us with a bubble of content we have been algorithmically calculated to enjoy,” he says. “He argues for the importance of serendipity and exposing yourself to truly different experiences.”

I think GetLostBot is the first service I’ve ever subscribed to that offers a “bravery” setting. It allows you to fine tune how often you want GetLostBot to send you new challenges and how “out there” they should be.

GetLostBot is a fun way to challenge yourself to try new things. I like the approach of not telling you where you’re going. I think if it did, my preconceived notions of a place would likely prevent me from giving it a try.

Give GetLostBot a try and let us know in the comments if it helps you find something new and interesting.

For ages, people have been wondering how crowded places are before they go. Before foursquare, your options were to either show up and take your chances or call and ask an employee, who may or may not give you a straight answer. FoursCrowd, a new web and mobile site, aims to help by using foursquare’s data to determine if a particular place is crowded.

FoursCrowd lets you search for a particular foursquare venue by name and compares the number of people currently checked in to the total number of checkins to determine if it’s currently crowded or not. It also shows you an all-time popularity score so you can gauge how popular the place is and its confidence level in the crowd estimate.

There’s also an option to show trending venues (places with five or more people checked in) within a given area. It’s a good tool for finding the current hotspots.

Foursquare data is useful for a lot of things, but outside of New York and San Francisco (where the penetration is much higher), I’m not sure how useful it would be. There simply aren’t enough people checking in on foursquare to create a statistically relevant sample size. At 3 pm, my local Chipotle, for example, shows one person checked in; FoursCrowd says this means the place is crowded. I know that unless they’re handing out free burritos in the parking lot, that’s unlikely to be the case.

FoursCrowd is a fun tool for getting a quick idea how many people are checked in somewhere on foursquare, but I don’t think there’s quite enough data to really make it reliably useful at this point. Hopefully as foursquare’s userbase continues to grow, the numbers will hold more relation to real world traffic patterns.

I love all these little services that are popping up that use foursquare’s push API to send you relevant tidbits of content when you check in at certain places. The latest is called CheckinRecipe.

The name should tell you everything you need to know. When you check in at a grocery store, it sends you a direct message on Twitter with a link to a new recipe to try.

Setup is simple. You connect your Twitter and foursquare accounts on the CheckinRecipe site and you’re done. If you want, you can tell CheckinRecipe if you’re a vegetarian or vegan and it will send recipes tailored to your diet.

The recipes are currently being curated by the developer, Zach Hale. If you know of something particularly tasty, you can submit it from the site. As a user with 243 grocery store checkins over the past 23 months, I hope he’s got a bunch of recipes in the queue!

UPDATE: I want to point out a really brilliant idea from Joshua Fishman on Twitter:

Great way for brands (CPG) to communicate with consumers? http://t.co/O4wh8SRV cc: @dens @tristanwalker @rachpr18 @babs26

January 2, 2012 3:24 pm via Twitter for MacReplyRetweetFavorite

@joshuadfishman

Joshua Fishman

Kraft, for instance, could set up a similar site and ask their fans to register. They could then send one of the bazillions of recipes from their site right at the critical decision point. What better time to remind customers of your brand and give them specific, actionable advice than when they’re entering the grocery store (or any other relevant store, for that matter)?

/Spotted via TheNextWeb

Just in time for Christmas, the creators of Timehop have built a new site to help you share memories from your past with others. Pastcards creates an ecard to share your social media Christmas memories from years past.

You can choose from Facebook and Instagram photos or foursquare checkins (and photos from last year) to add content to your card. It all gets included in a nice looking ecard with your content grouped by year. There’s even a spot to add your own personalized message.

When you’ve got everything added that you want to include you can choose to share the card with friends via Twitter, Facebook or email.

Pastcards are a fun way to share some past Christmas memories with your family and friends. And for the Timehop guys, they make a cool viral method for showing what Timehop is all about — reconnecting with your past.

For me, email has mostly become a relic of the past. I hardly ever check it, but there is one email I get every day that I look forward to that forces me to check it at least once each morning. That email comes from 4squareand7years ago, showing me my foursquare checkins from exactly one year ago.

Today 4squareand7years ago relaunched as Timehop, focusing not just on your foursquare checkins, but on your social media profiles as a whole, including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. The daily emails will now include a recap of your activities from a year ago across all four networks.

Timehop will also show off a new feature 4squareand7years ago users haven’t seen yet: foursquare photos. Tomorrow marks the one year anniversary of foursquare launching photo support, so those photos will start rolling out in tomorrow’s Timehop emails. I’ve actually been going back and adding photos from my DSLR to my foursquare checkins specifically so they’ll show up in these emails.

Built by TechStars NYC alums Benny Wong and Jonathan Wegener, 4squareand7yearsago was one of the most popular foursquare-focused apps of 2011. It launched at foursquare’s first hack day in February and has since been touted foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley in almost every talk he’s given this year.

I’m a big fan of 4squareand7yearsago (and sister service and7yearsagram — a similar site for Instagram photos), so I’m excited to see what the team will do now that they’re incorporating posts from my other social networks. If nothing else, Timehop is at least a hell of a lot easier to type.

What do you think of the addition of Facebook and Twitter to the popular 4squareand7yearsago emails?

Every check-in we make on foursquare is like leaving a little track of all the places we’ve been. Those tracks can be put to all sorts of interesting uses that Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai never could have imagined when they conceived the service in 2008. One such use is using those check-ins to track our carbon footprint and educate us on our impact to the environment.

That’s the purpose of a new app from AMEE called the AMEE Location Footprinter (ALF for short). It calculates the distance between your foursquare checkins and then makes an educated guess on what form of transport you used between the two destinations, which enables it to figure out exactly how big your carbon footprint was for that leg of your journey.

Each week, ALF sends you an email with your total carbon footprint for the week. It makes an easy way to see just how much impact you had on the environment and how tiny changes in your habits can influence your impact in major ways.

AMEE is a software as a service provider that helps major companies calculate the impact their decisions have on the environment.

ALF does make a few assumptions about your mode of travel that may or may not be accurate (sadly, walking between venues often isn’t an option here in suburbia), so it shouldn’t be used as a definitive account of your carbon footprint, but it is a fun way to see what kind of an impact you’re making on the environment.

What do you think of ALF? Do you think its numbers are accurate?